In response to a rapidly changing world - Gertrude presents Hope in the Dark, a street-facing exhibition in the windows at Gertrude Contemporary and the window vitrine at Gertrude Glasshouse. This project will evolve over the coming days and weeks (or as long as possible) while our regular programming is on hold.

Exploring ideas of confusion, resignation and anxiety offset with humour, hope and resilience, these gestures offer an opportunity for a bit of aesthetic and comic relief while we collectively #stayhome.

The first work on view is by Gertrude Studio Artist Alumni Simon Zoric, UH-OH, 2010. Enjoy.

The next work we offer up is Everything IS a bit fucked, 2016 by current Gertrude Studio Artist Sarah Brasier.

The next work we’ve added to this evolving exhibition Hope in the Dark is by Gertrude Studio Artist Alumni Kiron Robinson, Don’t forget me, 2008.

Still visible to passersby as the residue of an exhibition closed before its time, Tounge, 2019 by Lewis Fidock and Gertrude Studio Alumni Joshua Petherick takes on an altogether different resonance as the works of Hope in the Dark are installed around it. Pointed directly downward, the undulating slide not only mimics a global economy in free fall but serves as a reminder of the public playgrounds closed the country over, as children (and parents alike) experience the longest school holidays imaginable.

We’ve just added Dance Rites, 2017, by incoming Gertrude Studio Artist Amrita Hepi. In the work, a lone figure dances in a theatre absent of viewers, eerily reflecting the current state of closure of theatres and performance spaces across the nation.

Darren Sylvester’s 2018 photographic work, ominously titled The End, was originally produced in reference to the end titles for films created by Universal Pictures. What would have then been a symbol of US efforts toward global cultural distribution now holds as a gloomy signifier of a pandemic’s expansion across the world.